Once upon a time-OH MY GOD IT’S GABE F*CKING NEWELL! Also this is probably going to be the third and last time I start off a review like this. Remember when this man was not just a living legend, but also a meme? That may sound like a curse especially the biggest memes of today revolve around scams and disasters, but back then being known across the internet meant you were doing something right. Gabe Newell was doing something right! You want to know what his job was? Being the president of Valve. If you readers don’t know what Valve is then I’m ashamed of you, so allow me to bring you up to speed. The year is 1996 and a little company was established at Kirkland, Washington. The two founders were Mike Harrington and Gabe Newell of course, and their goal was to lead a team of passionate developers to develop video games. The console market was busy at the time, the hardware of computers was getting stronger, and PC gaming was on the rise with titles like Fallout, Diablo, and System Shock. Valve wanted to profit off of the PC landscape and create a title made being a PC gamer worth it. At the time it was mainly consoles dominating the market, but Valve would make something truly incredible. A legend worth remembering.
Through blood, sweat, tears, and two harsh years of development Valve created Half-Life. A first person shooter which placed a heavy emphasis on story, world building, and immersion. First person shooters are really common these days, but Half-Life set a benchmark back then. Not only was it graphically impressive and pushed what computers could do, but it showed that shooters weren’t always about smoke and mirrors. Doom was the most influential shooter of the 1990s, and any game that adapted its design formula was deemed a Doom clone. Maybe it was because they didn’t do enough to differentiate themselves, and some of these games literally just copied the story premise of Doom. In Blood you carry a crap load of guns and shoot demons from beyond our realm. In Quake, although made by Id Software, you carry a crap load of guns and shoot demons… I mean lovecraftian monsters from a realm beyond our own. In Duke Nukem 3D you flirt with ladies, carry a crap load of guns, and then shoot aliens from beyond our realm! All these games tried to imitate the Doom formula, but even though they tried very hard to copy Doom they were all still great. What they shared in common was that they put a heavy center on action, violence, reaction, and above all gameplay. Not much thought was put into the story, and if so it was writing focused on making their characters sound like badasses. John Carmack had a phrase which described this amazingly well, but I stated it dozens of times in the past and I don’t want to look weird by saying a phrase with an uncomfortable NSFW word in it even though a majority of adults know what it is and I'm assuming half you weirdos looked at it at some point in your life. Probably high schoolers because a lot of teens these days are really h*rny. Why am I saying all this? We’ll just leave it at that.
Not many shooters cared about storytelling or doing quite enough to differentiate themselves from their main influencer, but when Half-Life hopped along the landscape changed. Not only were there enough differentiating elements to allow the core gameplay to go beyond just rapidly shooting monsters nonstop, but Valve managed to craft an interesting sci-fi story that hooked the player in. It wasn’t original, but it was thrilling nonetheless. It was enough to get players to push forward and see what lay ahead of the next fight or puzzle. Half-Life is considered by many to be a masterpiece, and even though some sections didn’t age all too well the moments that stood out were bold. The legacy of Half-Life would live on through its sequel which is also considered one of the best games ever made, the sequel’s two expansions, a VR game that came out more than a decade after the series was almost forgotten and ended up being better than it should have, and much more. Half-Life is referenced quite a bit in Valve’s other work, in fact Portal takes place within the Half-Life universe. Then there’s the modding community, which is possibly one of the biggest reasons Half-Life is still an active and well discussed franchise despite the developers not touching it again.
The Half-Life modding community consists of the most talented individuals out there, and some of the content they developed is big enough to be considered their own individual games. Some of these mods actually did become their own games, and Valve allowed the creators to sell their games on the Steam Store. You know that PC game store they created and own the rights to? There’s Garry Mod, a development sandbox that allows you to mess around with the models and assets of other games, as well as build your own maps and creations as long as the games runs on the Source Engine which is what Half-Life 2 runs on. The development team behind The Stanley Parable, which was originally a Half-Life 2 mod, formed an independent studio and made it a full fledged game. There was the fangame Hunt Down The Freeman which is an atrocity no one, not even the voice actors hired for the game, want to talk about. There’s just so many good mods, inspirations, and pieces of fanwork which stem from Half-Life. Today’s fangame is different though. Not only was the fangame approved by Valve, but it spent almost eight years in development as the team behind it struggled to figure out where to take it. In the end they pulled it off and ultimately I’d say their efforts were worth it. The game I’m talking about is Black Mesa by Crowbar Collective.
Black Mesa is a full remake of the original Half-Life using the Source Engine. Work on it began back in 2012 when a small group of fans were reflecting back on the Source adaptation Valve did of Half-Life after the success of Half-Life 2. This version was known as Half-Life: Source, and it was infamous with the Half-Life community. It was rushed, unpolished, and didn’t do a good job updating the original Half-Life or attempting to fix problems it already had. It was a lazy cash grab made after the success of Half-Life, and Valve knew this themselves and shortly afterwards apologized. These fans imagined how incredible Half-Life: Source would have been if it used the same graphics and had the same level of quality of Half-Life 2, so they decided for the next few years to make it themselves. They would remake the entirety of Half-Life using the Source Engine, and they would fix the biggest issues other fans had about the game. Mainly, the platforming and disappointing chore that was Xen. They released trailers to their fan project, Black Mesa, and soon opened it up for early access on Steam. Everytime they were done remaking a section of Half-Life they would add it into the game until the final version was released. The reimagining of Xen did push back the release of Black Mesa though as the direction went all over the place.
2020 was when the definitive version of Black Mesa finally came out, and by then it felt a little too late. The last successful video game Valve released was Portal 2 back in 2011, and people gave up on the company as they never touched any of their beloved franchises again. They did manage their multiple shooters like Team Fortress 2 and Counter Strike: Global Offense for a while, but eventually they stopped adding content to them and the servers were overrun with cheaters and hackers. Recently they dealt with the problem, but it goes to show how Valve really did abandon their past work. However, Valve did make a comeback in 2020 with the surprising release of Half-Life: Alyx. A game designed to showcase their new VR headset, the Valve Index. Both Half-Life: Alyx and the Valve Index were great, because they actually made use of what a VR headset could do. Half-Life was the talk of the town again, and it wasn’t just Alyx that help bring Half-Life back with style. Black Mesa came out the exact same month and if you were someone who couldn’t afford a headset to play Half-Life: Alyx you could hop into the fan remake instead. A nice surprising treat for poor folks.
The final product was brilliant and delivered on all the goals Crowbar Collective had in mind. The critics who did end up playing the game praised how Black Mesa managed to bring back a highly acclaimed classic better than ever, and stated it was one of the best examples of how to do a remake as it managed to fix problems the original had like Xen. A couple of people online even considered it to be one of the best games of 2020, and I don’t blame them. The Half-Life series is a franchise I’ve been meaning to get to for quite some time, and Black Mesa was the perfect opportunity to finally introduce myself. I picked it up during a winter sale last year, and it wasn’t until recently I finally sat down to play the game. Was the hype worth it? Yeah, it definitely was. While the game suffers from performance issues and glitches, Black Mesa as a whole is splendid and the best way to go if you want to experience one of the most important title in gaming history. Today we’ll be talking about why I loved Black Mesa and why it deserves your attention. So let's, who the f*ck are yo- (Load shocking noise)
“Gordon Freeman in the flesh”
Story
The Black Mesa Research Facility, a secret underground laboratory located somewhere within the United States. Created for the sole purpose of testing experimental equipment and developing weapons for the military, Black Mesa specializes in nuclear materials and robotics. They have built machines to help them with their heavy duty work, laser energy to power the facility and melt down materials, and several tunnel systems to conveniently get their scientists from one end to the other. Black Mesa is one of the most advanced scientific companies in the US, and luckily you are one of the many scientists who work for them. Gordon Freeman, a man who holds a master’s degree in physics and is one of the best members on the team. Gordon one day shows up late to work, but all isn’t that bad as he takes a tramcar to his facility. He’s greeted by a security guard who lets him in, and his coworkers say hello. Today’s job is a little different from what Gordon would usually do. He has to push a large clump of an unknown substance into a giant laser which the team will use to fry the substance, and to make sure he doesn't get injured while in the chamber the team decide to give Gordon a new suit they created to prevent injuries. The Hazardous EnVironment Suit, otherwise the HEV Suit. Designed to withstand high degree burns, scratches, collision, nuclear exposure, and even bullets. It was a suit designed for multiple purposes and Gordon looks like the perfect candidate to test the suit out.
Gordon straps on the suit, it powers up, and he makes his way down to the testing chamber. His team mates try to act calmly around him and state the test will be safe. It is clear that they are lying to you, because they try to avoid the conversation that something bad will happen when trying to mess around with substances they have no knowledge of. They activate the laser, and Gordon slowly pushes the cart into the middle of the room. Just when he does that the laser starts to change. It shifts, turns, and begins to shake the entire room. The scientists in the control room try to shut the laser down, but are unable to due to malfunctions. The laser releases a massive explosion and the control room is burnt to smithereens. Gordon is unable to exit the chamber as the testing room doors have been sealed shut. The kinetic energy of the laser hits Gordon, and he’s transported to numerous places he doesn’t recognize. He gets a glimpse of what appears to be an alien world and the inhabitants don’t look all that friendly. When the teleporting comes to an end Gordon is knocked out. Not knowing what dangers may lie when he finally wakes up.
When Gordon finally wakes up he finds the entire testing chamber torn to bits. The chamber doors are now open and the scientists who are alive state that through Black Mesa is overrun with aliens. People got injured in the explosion, power is slowly running out, and weird monsters are starting to roam around in the halls. Killing anything they come across and bring deceased humans back from the dead. Gordon is the only one capable of dealing with the issues at hand since he has the HEV Suit, and overtime he accumulates an arsenal that allows him to fight back against the alien invaders. Gordon is able to activate the communication network, and luckily the scientists of Black Mesa are able to call the United States Military for help. When the military finally arrives though it turns out the scientists aren't being rescued. The military have been ordered to kill anything they find within Black Mesa, both the aliens and the scientists. No one can know what happened in Black Mesa and the chaos mustn't be allowed to spread. Gordon must not only fight back against the military, but figure out how to get rid of the alien invaders and prevent what could be an upcoming apocalypse. He may even learn of Black Mesa’s past and how not everything he and several others were warned about before the disastrous experiment is what it seems.
Gameplay
Black Mesa is one of the earliest first person shooters to come out, but it helped influence the design trends we see today. However, it manages to maintain the design tropes of classic shooters and take a huge step forward. For the time at least. You venture through linear structured levels, fight enemies using the wide arsenal at your disposal, and pick up supplies so that you don’t run out of ammunition or health during a busy fight. You have a health bar and when it reaches zero you die and are forced back to your latest save. You also have a powered up shield as part of the HEV Suit, which serves as an extra layer of protection from attacks. Potentially soaking up damage that would normally go to your health bar. Health is replenished by picking up medkits, and the power of the HEV Suit is regenerated by picking up energy cores. They can also be restored by visiting stations designed to refill one of the two. However, these stations have a limited supply so you can’t just heavily rely or run back to them.
Combat is fairly simple to explain. Black Mesa will throw a variety of enemies at the player as they progress further into the game. Each enemy has their own unique abilities, behaviors, and quickly adjust to the scenario at hand. The iconic Headcrab is easy to kill, but quickly hops around the screen and bites away at the player. The Headcrab Zombie is a corpse that is easy to deal with as they move slowly, but can deal a fair amount of damage up close and if you don’t aim for the Headcrab on the corpse’s head it will come off after defeat and attack you as usual. Then you have the more advanced enemies. The ones designed to out number, overwhelm, and work together against the player. I don’t remember their specific names, but I’ll try to describe them to the best of my abilities. We have these one eye balled goons about your size who can shoot laser energy at you and release a shockwave if you come too close. These waddling lizard gators who spit acid from afar, and it spreads into a bigger wave the farther it travels. These armored behemoths who take a fair amount of bullets to kill, and rapidly fire at you using what appear to be acidic automatic rifles. Then you have the United States Military of course, while not packing as much variety as the alien invaders are pretty dynamic. They pinpoint the player’s location, move quickly towards you, lay down suppressing fire, out flank you when you aimlessly fire away at them, and can quickly adapt to the current situation. They actually feel like a trained fighting force rather than a bunch of bots who pop in and out of cover. They seem to be the hardest enemy to deal with in the game, but it does make sense.
You have a nice selection of guns to fight off foes, and they can be really useful when you know when to properly use them. The Assault Rifle is good for laying fire down on numerous foes or quickly taking out a single opponent if you can deal with the sway created by the rapid firing of the bullets. The Shotgun, while slow and takes a while to reload, deals heavy damage up close and is good for players who play risky. The Crossbow is good for sniping enemies from afar, deals critical damage if you nail a headshot, and is one of the few weapons which works underwater. There’s the Rocket Launcher which fires slow moving but powerful projectiles. The Revolver which is better than the starting Pistol, but you carry less ammo for it. The Tau Cannon which can be charged up to fire a powerful energetic laser to snipe from afar. The Gluon Gun melts foes apart quickly, but in return consumes energy quickly. Then you have frag grenades, remote detonate explosives, and even some alien weapons like the acidic claw and Snarks. All of these weapons are fun to use and some even have a secondary firing mode. Whether it’s the under barrel explosive launcher of the Assault Rifle, or the Shotgun being able to fire two shells at once in exchange of having a longer cooldown rate. Every gun functions simple, but is fun to wield thanks to their impact.
As for the level design it’s fairly linear. You are dumped into arena styled battlefields, but the game does a good job guiding the player forward down the story path. Sometimes the way forward isn’t all that simple and the player is forced to explore. Pursue side objectives, locate consoles to activate the door leading to the next area, and even activate machinery to eliminate bigger monsters blocking the way. There is some variety provided so that the game isn’t mainly just gunfight after gunfight. You have the occasional platforming section where you must carefully navigate across a cliff or high area, and then there’s the puzzles. Trust they don’t get better until you reach Xen. Speaking of Xen, that's probably the biggest thing about this remake. The original version of Xen was this weird platforming section where you had to make leaps of faith and it wasn’t always clean where you had to go. The new version of Xen is not only original, but is comprehensible and easy to navigate much like the Black Mesa Research Facility. It gives clear indications of what you do, has some sections where you must explore, and any platforming challenges provided are linear and make use of a long jump backpack the player is provided for the endgame. It’s really cool and rather than being this dull environment full of brown surfaces it’s instead a colorful space full of cosmic sky, plant life, and echoes being heard from afar. You may even learn more about Black Mesa’s past. Besides that there really isn’t much else I can say about Black Mesa besides my overall thoughts. It’s a fun shooter and it does enough to keep you interested from beginning to end. Hopefully you can chase back the alien invasion, resist the military, and survive what is possibly one of the worst days on the job.
Thoughts
Black Mesa is the best way you can experience a Valve classic and is a fellow reminder as to why Half-Life is timeless. It carries over everything Half-Life did right, refines them, and anything that has been added that the original version of Half-Life didn’t have improves an already great game. There’s just so much to love, but I do want to bring up what is possibly the biggest flaw with Black Mesa. The performance on a PC will depend on how good your hardware is. If you are playing this on a top notch gaming computer then Black Mesa should run really smoothly. If you don’t or if you are playing this on a work computer like me then be prepared to face quite a few issues. Constant stuttering, framerate drops, the gaming loading the next room in front of you, and at times the game bugging out and preventing you from moving forward as you probably got stuck in the floor or an object. It happened so frequently for me that Black Mesa became a chore to go through. Not a pain as the game was still really fun, but even at the lowest settings it still struggled. The second to last level I had to skip halfway through, because there was just so much going on and so many framerate drops that it made Black Mesa feel unplayable. Other issues include the controller recognition not being programmed in the final version, so you have to activate it through Steam and afterwards set up the buttons before they weren’t up. Final issue is that while platforming sections don’t last too long in Black Mesa, they are still annoying to go through. No matter how good of a first person shooter you make, platforming just doesn’t mix well with the gameplay and disrupts the flow by throwing a section the movement was not designed around. Games like Portal and Mirror’s Edge worked because they specialized in navigation and the level design matched the player’s skills.
Outside of these issues Black Mesa is brilliant. There’s a reason why the original Half-Life is still remembered to this day. It was a tightly designed linear experience that made the most out of its restrictions and presented a thrilling story people still look fondly back to. It’s not the most compelling story imaginable and it doesn’t contain the emotions of something like God of War or Spiritfarer, but it is well written and the events that unfold keep escalating the main plot. The vague information from the beginning makes the player confused for what is to come next. The military killing anyone within Black Mesa makes you realize you are on your own, and you have to do what you can to survive. Being dumped into the past facilities of Black Mesa only confuses the player more as they find out the team was lying this whole time about their knowledge on the alien world. Then the player is sent to the alien world themself, Xen, and through there we learn the background of the creatures we have been fighting since the beginning. How some of these species are being forced to fight a war they don’t want to partake in. The story of Half-Life is brilliant, because it makes use of the sci-fi elements to deliver excitement that only the genre could possess.
The level design is linearly structured, but never during this linear designed adventure did the game insult the player’s intelligence. Never was there an icon on a radar, or a pop up telling you what to do. They present information through the story and expect the player to easily figure this out on your own. They even teach the rules of the world and the behaviors of enemies through demonstration. Either an NPC gets killed by an enemy, or they are dumb enough to walk into a trap. It may paint the most knowledgeable souls alive as stupid, but it allows the player to learn quickly. The game also makes good use of lighting, color, and environmental storytelling to lure the player towards the right direction. It’s linear, but never holds the player by the hand. There are even some sections designed to test the patience of the player. Like this one room full of explosives and laser detectors which you must then carefully navigate through.
Combat in Black Mesa is fairly challenging. The aliens are never too hard or easy, and when the difficulty ramps up it’s because you are playing uncarefully and not adapting to the situation. The military however is where the player is forced to approach with a different strategy. You must always keep moving and land perfect shots when you can. The intensity and AI of the military is dynamic, and always keeps the player on their toes. All of your guns are satisfying to fire because of their sounds and how impactful they are upon contact. The player should never run out of ammunition as the game willingly provides them more even during fights, and arenas are big enough to provide the player enough to rush around and distance themself from enemy hordes. Even if the game does place them within cramp halls they don't shove so many enemies or objects to clutter the screen. It’s amazing combat, scenarios, and the right amount of challenge. On the box of the original game there was a phrase, "Run, Shoot, Live." That is extremely true as you always want to be moving and adapting on the fly. It helps make a first person shooter with modern design tropes engaging and reactive.
The environments and graphical overhauls are two of the biggest factors of Black Mesa as practically everything that made the setting of Half-Life iconic was recreated using the elements of Half-Life 2 and the Source Engine. The underground facilities of Black Mesa have been carried over and feel more like a workplace thanks to more detailing. When it all goes to shambles the horrifying feeling works thanks to lighting. When you step outside onto the surface you are presented with this bright blue skyline and an orange rocky canyon stretching for miles. Xen, as stated earlier, is jaw dropping as it’s this colorful cosmic space which pushes the Source Engine to its limit. This is the section where Black Mesa starts to experience performance issues, but it is impressive to say the least. I also want to say the sound design of Black Mesa is great and they managed to carry over all of the dialogue lines of the original and freshen them up so they don’t sound as old. Joel Nielsen, the main composer for Black Mesa, made an excellent soundtrack and every action packed moment of this game is made better with his music. He’s standing up there with Darren Korb and Mick Gordon as one of the most talented individuals the music scene in gaming has seen.
After all these compliments I can thoroughly say I strongly recommend Black Mesa. It’s only available on Steam and it requires really good computer hardware, but for twenty bucks you get a chunky single player focused shooter lasting from fifteen to twenty hours long. There’s also a multiplayer mode, but no one really talks about it. You buy Black Mesa to re-experience a classic and luckily Half-Life hasn’t aged a day thanks to how the team at Valve carefully designed this game. Crowbar Collective delivered a faithful remake that doesn’t tarnish the essence of what made Half-Life special, and that’s why Black Mesa is one of the best examples of how to do a video game remake. In the end I am going to give Black Mesa a 9/10 for excellence at best.
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